Sugar Calendar is a powerful yet simple events calendar that's a relative unknown in the WordPress realm. It has the potential to be one of the best, if not the best, events calendar plugin ever.
Their team has publicly stated on Twitter they intend for this plugin to expand way beyond what it currently offers while keeping a simple, easy to use management of event scheduling.
These are some great additions that will definitely push Sugar Calendar to the top of the list for event calendars. Although no ETA was stated, we hope to see most if not all of them this year.
This review is going to cover what it offers now, how easy is it to use, and a few other things as well. If you're not interested in the review, you can check out two different live examples of the calendar (Regular Example and Customized Example).
The admin area of this plugin is pretty straight forward. You have 3 menu options: Calendar, Add New, and Settings.
Calendar allows you to see all the events you've created, the info on them, and to edit them. You have four layout choices to view them: Monthly, Weekly, Daily, and List. The list view is the one closet to a regular page or post list type. So this may be easier for those use to this type of layout.
Under this menu is also a Calendar tab. The devs at Sugar Calendar have taken a different approach to how they handle categories, they list them as Calendars. So this is where you create all your calendar categories such as holidays, vacation, birthdays...etc.
Add New lets you add new events, both single day and multiple day events, and recurring events (daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly). The recurring events let you set an end date as well to stop the event if you desire.
You can add a description, create a new calendar (category), and set a featured image. The title, date/time, and description is what will populate and show on the actual page for the individual events.
Settings contains the area to add a license key for automatic updates and to unlock pro features, change display options such as start of week day and date/time layout, and to enable beta updates.
That's it for the admin area for this plugin. Pretty straight forward and minimal. Adding new events is pretty simple and has just the right amount of info needed to create a great events calendar.
The default version is disappointing, but this doesn't mean it's not usable and if you know CSS you can definitely give it some style. Not sure where to start with the CSS, check out our article on using the Chrome tool, Inspect.
We hope in future releases the devs add some improvements to the design and style of these two layouts. We also hope they give some flexibility to those who aren't comfortable using CSS to make some color changes as well. Another improvement we would love to see is an easy way to find and add the appropriate shortcode. As of right now, we've only found this on the devs site and nowhere else. This should definitely be added somewhere within the plugin settings area.
Again, all is not lost though when it comes to the overall look of the default calendars. With a little CSS you make it look A LOT better. Scroll down to see what we are talking about. If you're wondering how we achieved this look, take a look at our tutorial: Owning the Sugar Events Calendar with CSS.
So even with a few things we think need to be improved, we recommend you trying this calendar plugin out and even buying it. Honestly this will be added to our web design tool belt for future client projects.
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